A reader over on our Twitter recently brought to our attention a weekly MLB feature on ESPN, known as the 100s Tracker. They say that the purpose of this tracker is “projecting (the) date (the) Red Sox, (and) others will hit (the) century mark”. Naturally, anything about projecting baseball wins using "on-pace" grabs my attention, especially when it is from America's own entertainment and sports programming network.
If you have been following this blog during this summer, you should know that I have been fighting a bitter war against the blatant use of “on-pace” in sports analytics and arguing why it should instead be replaced by “expected wins”.
Comments
Wisdom of the crowd is more than the ill-fated television show of the same name. We have all heard the old adage, many minds are better than one, and this can be seen abundantly in nature. Across countless species, nature show us that social creatures, when working together as unified systems, can outperform the vast majority of individual members when solving problems and making decisions. Examples include bees, fish, and ants.
It should come as less of a surprise, then, that humans working together in tandem can efficiently converge decision problems, and even make accurate predictions. This theory of collective intelligence has been studied and analyzed for the past century to try and validate how, when, and in what circumstances it accurately and inaccurately predicts. Have you heard of machine learning but haven’t found a way to implement any algorithms? Do you use R for all of your machine learning models and are wondering how to scale and deploy your models to production quickly and efficiently? Do you solely use R, or caret, for your machine learning models and want to diversify your skillset? No judgement if you do, but let me introduce you to a, in my opinion, superior way to craft and deploy machine learning models using Python and scikit-learn. No. No, they are not. Wait, don’t go! Hear me out. And I still have some good news for any Red Sox fans out there at the end of this post. In case you haven’t seen, the Red Sox are in the process of breaking baseball. Over the weekend, they swept the Yankees at Fenway in what could probably be a preview of the ALDS this postseason. As of this writing, on August 7, the Red Sox have a record of 79-34, for a winning percentage of 0.699. They are in first place in the AL East, with a 9 game lead over the Yankees, who just happen to have the third best record in all of baseball. |
Archives
August 2019
Categories
All
|